


Disappear

by august_the_real



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 07:57:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3112094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/august_the_real/pseuds/august_the_real
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I fall down in the shape of you"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disappear

title: disappear  
author: august  
email: mrsrosiebojangles.com

 

* 

She left Bajor for the first time when she was seventeen. She was young, and angry, but she was armed and she could kill. She left Bajor for the first time when she was seventeen and finally realised that the universe didn't care why she had been hungry all her life, why she had learnt to fight before she had learnt to fuck. 

He's started to leave things in her quarters. Small things: a padd, a small Alonian shape that turns into itself and then out. He's being trying to shapeshift into for days, she smiles when she thinks that he is finally comfortable enough to do it in her quarters. 

For the first while they were together, she could sometimes feel him next to her in bed, rigid and alert, waiting for her to fall asleep so that he could go to his quarters and regenerate. She used to close her eyes and pretend to sleep, wondering how she managed to find herself in another relationship where she waited for someone to leave her bed. 

She's survived refugee camps, Cardassian occupations and an alternate universe, yet she sometimes wondered whether she would survive the man in her bed. It swings back and forth like this, her life. Ordered to help the Gul who once held her against a wall, course fingers crushing windpipes. Watching a Cardassian try to cut out the not-hers child growing inside her. 

Finding sleep in the bed of a lonely Shapeshifter, who looks at her with eyes so full of something it might even be fear. 

She grew up in the workcamps of Bajor. She was a tiny spit of a girl, and she fights hard every day not to look at the world through that girl's eyes. She thinks too little of people, most people, and she is trying to change that. 

He's the saddest person she's ever known, although to Weuyon he's a God and to Starfleet he's a science. She's seen him pull apart drunken Klingons but when his back is against a wall, he doesn't come out fighting. He's so quick to collapse into himself, to walk away; for the first few months they were together she wasn't sure it would last. She was used to men who fought - governments, wars and her, she wasn't sure she knew how to do anything else. 

And then they sat in a dark stairwell on the promenade one night, and watched the worlds go by. She made up elaborate stories for the people walking past, he rubbed her back. She laughed and laughed when he whispered "holo-porn smuggler" as Sisko walked past. 

She laughed and laughed until he kissed her, recklessly; until she was underneath him on the stairs; until she told him she loved him; until he stopped suddenly with his hands still in her hair. 

She was once beaten by two Cardassians, face pushed down into ore but it never hurt, never stung like this. 

And then he spoke, this strange slip of a man who had half the station scared and who often speaks only for her. She listened, in darkness, in the stairwell, on the promenade, as he spoke of scientists and Cardassians and empty nights of nothing and 

and she's heard it before, heard it all before, a hundred times across the galaxy. But this is Odo, this is hers, and she thinks for the first time in a long time that she would like to hurt these people, again. 

and she says, "but that's not me, Odo."  
and he says, "I know, Nerys. I try to know." 

And she knows that tone, all scrubbing skin clean and smiles. She has used it before (and will use it again, much later, when she can once again talk of him) and she promises herself right then he will never use it again. 

* 

They talk, sometimes, about where they would travel after the war. He wants to visit Vulcan. She smiles when he tells her this. He feels a companionship with Vulcans although when she tries to tell him this is illogical, he simply laughs, once. She likes his laughter, spat out as it is, like he can barely bring himself to hold it inside him a minute longer. 

She'd like to visit Earth one day, although she know how he feels about it. Neither of them mention the great link, or the Gamma Quadrant. She thinks that this is what it must be like, their life together, partial understandings and a desire for more. 

* 

He seems to be captivated by watching her drink. She knows he has studied this before, has watched the replimats and the restaurants, probably knows better than anyone the eating habits of humanoids. Still, he watches her and when she sets down her glass, he kisses her throat at the point where she swallows. 

* 

It is easier for a Bajoran to mate with a Cardassian than a Shapeshifter, they learnt that on their first night together. When Odo had kissed her on the Promenade she hadn't thought that he would be simply mimicking humanoid behaviour. 

"How do we do this?" She had asked later that night, as her food got cold on the table, as his fingers grabbed at her clothes. 

"I've seen, I mean, I know...how Bajorans.." He said, into her hair. 

"How do *you* do this?" She said, pulling back and touching his face. 

He looked away then, and pulled away. "I can't. Not with ... " 

"... a solid?" 

He nodded. "But I ... I can do it like you." 

There is a monument on Ridia, built when the planet was brought in the Federation. She's never visited the planet, but she can picture the monument in her mind, all silver and angles, burnt against the three suns. 

He used to have coffee waiting for her in his office every Tuesday. She can't remember ever telling him how she liked it, but it was there in the morning, just the same. He was all observation and patience and she sometimes could forget that they never talked about exactly what he did for the Cardassians. She feels rubbed raw with it all, she's not sure she could survive his rawness as well. And although he once told her that she was insignificant, she is drawn to him, like a memory of a monument she's never seen. 

There are more things in life than being sexually compatible, she thinks as he moves in her. Worf and Dax break each other's bones; interspecies mating has its problems. She can never offer him a link, a meld. She almost believes him when he tells her that it doesn't matter. 

* 

For a long time, she was scared to ask about shapeshifting. It's who he is, who he will be a long time after she is dead. She takes consolation in this fact, a little, that she will not be the one left alive. He's spoken about shapeshifting in shades of embarrassment, anger. He speaks of it in terms of duty, in terms of an acid bite past. 

They're scared of each other, like this. They have a war, an occupation, a resistance between them. It's easier not to ask questions about truth, that require truth. She thinks 'after the war' too much. 

She tries not to hurt him. 

But one day, she sits, cross-legged on the floor of his quarters and says "show me". And Odo, who she will sometimes later think of as the love of her life, does. 

* 

He watches her dress, like he watches her eat. Like he's trying to remember it all, like he one day expects her to leave. She feels heavy with it, sometimes, but when it's gone she will feel off-balance, without a centre. 

She left Bajor for the first time when she was seventeen. She was young, and angry, but she was armed and she could kill. She left Bajor for the first time when she was seventeen, but it had taken an occupation, a treaty and a life full of death and the prophets for her to realise that the only thing to fear was herself and the man in her bed who watched her like she is the one who will one day disappear.


End file.
